


Wingman's Torch

by Gyptian



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes & Sam Wilson Friendship, Canon Divergence - Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Christmas fic, Gen, Male Friendship, Rogue Avengers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 16:36:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17145269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gyptian/pseuds/Gyptian
Summary: Sam and Bucky gossip about their mutual friend and his Stark stalking in a cafe in Morocco.





	Wingman's Torch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AnastenLights](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnastenLights/gifts).



> Happy holidays! I hope the fic suitably fulfills your prompt AnastenLights!
> 
> This fic is all the better for the fantastic job Lore did betaing it. Thanks!

Bucky and Sam’s stretched legs competed for space beneath a tiny teak table. They’d made it two streets from the Grand Poste before their noses had followed the tempting waft of coffee into a cafe bright enough to be comfortable and small enough to be peaceful. Sam lounged, blissed out, against the straight back of the narrow couch that ran the length of the cafe. His hands lay on a stomach that gurgled as the pound of ice cream cake he’d eaten for lunch settled.

Bucky had ended upon a chair at right angles to the wall, with a full view of the door, long counter and kitchen. He’d had his nose tucked into one cappuccino after another for the last half hour, cup big enough he could spread both his hands around it. He hated how cold they got even in warm weather.

It felt good to sit down. Steve had kept them going at a steady clip ever since they’d left Wakanda so as not to ping any authority’s radar. They’d headed south first, arriving in Johannesburg just in time, it turned out, for Tony Stark to be attending the grand re-opening of the neighbourhood to which the Hulk had laid waste only eighteen months ago.

They’d been able to watch his speech on a screen, tucked like sardines in a crowd, before he’d left hastily, Iron Man called away to help protect the innocent his country. While they’d kept a low profile, they had attended some of the street parties that had sprung up around the city, Sam showing off what moves he remembered from high school and Bucky waltzing Natasha around the street to Kanye’s Spaceship blasted out of a boom box.

Then their little band of rogues had marched on to Tanzania, to Yemen, to Dubai, more or less coinciding with sightings of Tony Stark or Iron Man. Helping people in legitimate need in the meantime, sure, but the detours were frequent enough to form a rather telling pattern.

Now they were in Morocco, where Steve might actually manage a meet up. Stark’d been invited to attend the launch of their satellite before touring the humongous solar plant they’d built out in the desert. It had been announced on the news that he’d be joined by Pepper Potts in Marrakech to negotiate a deal for arc reactors to be installed in several cities, as part of Morocco’s push for greater independence.

Bucky remembered now, vaguely, the speeches from before the war about how America needed to remain aloof from all the European troubles. The current zeitgeist, every country huddling behind its borders, gave him a crawling sense of deja-vu. At least Morocco was getting more clean energy out of it.

When Natasha’d recognised the hotel Steve wanted to stake out as a place where one paid one thousand dollars a pop for a room, Sam had balked. He’d wished Steve sincere luck on his personal quest and announced that he was taking the day off. The rest of the group had taken their leave soon after. Witch Girl had started tapping away on her phone as she wandered off. Bucky wondered if she had a boyfriend. Natasha, if Bucky had to guess, had gone off to refresh her old contacts. It seemed North Africa and the Middle East had been her main turf; she hadn’t felt the need to take off when they’d been traveling around the south.

Bucky had jogged to catch up with Sam, waving off a spluttering Steve. Best friend duties did not include skulking around posh hotels. Sam had slapped him on the back and announced that his plans included something sweet with a lot of calories and vegging out. Bucky had heartily agreed.

Bucky liked Sam. The Falcon reminded the still-recovering man of his healers back in Wakanda. A calm, black man registered as safe to Bucky’s instincts, allowing his still-slow rational mind time to kick in. Yet at the same time Sam was comfortingly American. He’d also stepped up to anchor Steve, highflying idealist that he was, to earth in a way Bucky really couldn’t anymore.

Sam had grumbled over their friend’s latest quest while he dug into his ice cream cake, littered with nuts and dripping with caramel sauce.

Bucky had sat back, cup on his chest so the smell could float up to his nose. “Stevie’s always been like this, really. He divides the people he likes into comrades to fight beside him and crushes that embodied his cause.”

Sam looked up at him, eyebrow lifted. “I never saw any sign he was in love with Stark… or anyone. That time he kissed Carter surprised the hell out of me.”

“No…” Bucky tried to think how to phrase it. How people thought love worked had changed so much. “Women always just sort of happened to Steve. He didn’t pursue anyone… the boys always figured if he won a girl’s hand he’d panic because he wouldn’t know what to do with it. He has a generous heart, but he reserves it for his friends.”

Sam flashed his boyish grin, yellow with ice cream. “Please tell me you have stories. He knows way too many of mine from hanging out with my buddies at work. I need ammunition.” He lifted his plate and licked up the small pond that had started to emerge around his slice of ice cream cake. It gave Bucky some space to think before he was speared by eager eyes again.

He cleared his throat. “Alright… once upon a time two Irish boys attended Catholic school and there was a girl, brown hair in a braid, freckles and a gap-toothed smile, who shared math class with them. One of the boys, small and blonde and a tortured artist, drew this poor girl’s face on every single page of the sketchbook he filled up that autumn. He could count every freckle on her cheeks and never said a word to her. Sandy McClellan was her name.”

Bucky chuckled when he saw the glint in Sam’s eyes. “You gotta understand, that’s how love worked for us, then, when you were any kind of a gentleman. You’d like a girl and go to sleep thinking of her every night and, well, you might ask to step out with her if you were on her level and able to pay for dinner… but we weren’t. And Steve couldn’t even conceive of any man being anything other than a gentleman if they were in their right mind.” He smiled wistfully. “In the war… it was good to have a dame to reminisce over when talk turned to home but otherwise… you just took care of your own business. Some men picked up girls if we visited a town, but an officer, a good upright one? He wouldn’t.”

“You understand I’m not picturing Stark in a dress on top of a tower, waiting for his knight to serenade him,” Sam said. He quickly sketched Stark’s hair and beard on a sugar packet and tried to get it to sit on top of a salt shaker tower. 

Bucky snorted.

“No seriously. You gotta understand, I mean, I joined the Avengers shortly before Stark left but he was still around a lot and I have to say… Dude put on the flashiest show he could whenever Cap was in the room. Cap was his role model, or his hero. And Steve… he’d either be dazzled by the show or irritated by the pretense, depending on his mood. He always felt like he didn’t know where the act stopped and Stark began. And he never really trusted him after Ultron, figured a good man couldn’t produce a psycho robot.”

“The iron man had feet of clay,” Bucky quipped and Sam wiggled his hand to show his pun was only so-so. “I wonder what put him back up on the pedestal.” He dragged a hand over his face, settling again when he felt the liquid slosh around in the cup on his chest. “Sometimes I feel like Steve’s putting me up on one too. His lost past returned to him or some shit… can’t say it’s a nice place to be.” He shook his head. “I’m glad you’re around to play buffer when he gets to be a bit much.”

Sam put down his spoon, ice cream cake demolished, and wiped his hands on a napkin, tossing it onto his plate with a frown. “Not a problem, but… I mean, I know he’s been trying to draw you out, see how much of the old you’s still in there. But I thought that’s what you were, his best friend.”

Bucky shook his head, almost regretfully swallowing down the lukewarm coffee. He’d have to get a new one to warm his hands. “No… I’d say you are his friend, along with Natasha; the supporter and the challenger. The people he trusts to correct him and who can tell him what’s what without putting him into a tailspin.

“Me… I’m not who I was. I remember chunks of the past but I don’t… I don’t feel them. They’re just facts and images. I can use them to play Steve’s friend and it’s helped me trust him, I think. That’s still in there somewhere, that he’s family.”

Sam nodded, hands folded as he put his listening cap on. “But you’re estranged, is what you’re saying.”

“Yeah.” Bucky blew out a deep breath, trying to put into words the awareness that had been dawning on them as they’d traveled. “I mean, it’s easy to fall back into an old routine, like when you’re visiting home on leave but… you’ve grown and changed.”

“And been through incredibly traumatic things the other may not understand,” said Sam, softly and painfully, so that the truth dropped and rolled like a cracked glass marble between them, settling on its flat, chipped side.

“Yeah.” Bucky felt something in his shoulders loosen. It felt good to be seen for who he was. “And he’s changed from who he was, even when he won’t admit it and I… I want to know him, for him to know me. His longing for who we were to each other blinds him to the people we are now. I see him put on the mask of Good Ole Cap whenever he turns to speak to me. And even then… it’s like he doesn’t speak to me. He appeals to a Bucky who died seventy years ago and was buried under the Winter Soldier. All for the sake of resurrecting a friendship...Cap and Bucky against the world. That’s a memory, a lie I don’t want to live.”

Sam, because he was Sam, didn’t offer advice or say it would be alright. Rather, he recognised that the confession had been aired, squeezed Bucky’s flesh forearm and slouched as best he could on his narrow bench. “Time for the vegging to commence, methinks.”

Bucky stood up to find a refill so he could do some thinking with warm hands now that he’d cleared his head from what had been gnawing at the root of every thought.

"Y’know,” said Sam, when two-thirds of the tables had acquired new customers and two new people came on shift behind the counter. “If I gotta fill any man’s shoes, I’m honoured it’s yours.”

Bucky chuckled. “I suppose you’re not too awful to pass the baton to, either.”

“He’s a good man,” said Sam, more to the ether than to Bucky. “A flawed one, but then so am I. Helping him, him watching out for me, us trying to make the world a little better, makes it a less lonely place.” He side-eyed Bucky now. “You’re a good man, too, and a good friend.”

Bucky shook his head.

“To me,” continued Sam. “If you’d like to be.”

“If you can accept a walking ball of trauma.”

“Got a lot of friends who are,” Sam remarked dryly. “I’m one too, just a functioning one.”

Bucky shook his head. “I still got some figuring out to do.”

Sam nodded. “Take the time… and the space, if you need it.”

“Maybe I will.” Bucky drained his fourth cappuccino, which had gone cold as well.

“Just let me know before you take off, alright?” Sam’s last words nearly drowned out the notification dinging on both their phones, but the vibrations from their chest pockets had them sit up in sync. Group message. Steve. Bucky read through the wistful message saying that Stark and Potts staying in the hotel had probably been a rumour planted to mislead the media. But a choir was warming up their voices to sing Christmas carols; did they want to come?

Bucky glanced up at Sam. Sam looked at Bucky. They chuckled, stowed their phones simultaneously and walked shoulder to shoulder out the cafe. Watching the men around them, Bucky decided to sling his arm around Sam’s shoulder like other friends did.

When they entered the hotel lobby, a Christmas-themed fairy land with delicate lights, pixies and thankfully no stray media person, Bucky located Steve immediately. His big, booming tenor threaded through the choir. He stood head and shoulder above the rest of the back row with a music folder in his hand. A courageous soul had convinced him to wear an antler headband.

Exchanging a look, Sam and Bucky circled the choir and took up their positions at his shoulders. When they harmonised, Steve shot them an appreciative look over his shoulder.


End file.
